Time For You To Subscribe To The "Times," Hosni

I agree with my Facebook and Andover buddy and Phillipian better David Schwartz that, as first drafts of history go, this New York Times analysis of the Egyptian revolution is one of the best. If the so-called new media have produced anything in the last two weeks to match this exercise in careful reporting by trained professionals, I haven't seen it.

Until they do, long live the old media. If you're not subscribing, whether in print or digitally, to the Times or some other newspaper that is still committed to this kind of journalism, you might want to get on that. I think I read on a blog somewhere that Thomas Paine said it best: A free people will be a well-informed people only so long as they pay for content.

As for the lavish White House spin embedded in the article, extolling President Obama's Lincolnian vision over the horizon, we have no reason to doubt it:

[Obama] made the point early on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda narrative” of Western interference.

American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to Tahrir Square, wanting to see history being made, we knew this was something different,” one official said....

By Feb. 1, when Mr. Mubarak broadcast a speech pledging that he would not run again and that elections would be held in September, Mr. Obama concluded that the Egyptian president still had not gotten the message.

Within an hour, Mr. Obama called Mr. Mubarak again in the toughest, and last, of their conversations. “He said if this transition process drags out for months, the protests will, too,” one of Mr. Obama’s aides said.

Mr. Mubarak told Mr. Obama that the protests would be over in a few days.

Mr. Obama ended the call, the official said, with these words: “I respect my elders. And you have been in politics for a very long time, Mr. President. But there are moments in history when just because things were the same way in the past doesn’t mean they will be that way in the future.”

Cable News. Not.

Hat tip to my Facebook buddy David Schwartz for this Washington Post op-ed by Ted Koppel, who bemoans the rise of TV niche journalism (much of which, isn't). David learned about it from our fellow former Andover journalist Gary Lee. Two excerpts:

Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

And:

The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

As Koppel makes clear, because they make relatively little (if any) money, news divisions have always had a tenuous hold on the loyalty of network executives. So it probably should've been predictable that network news would be further eroded when someone figured out how to make money offering news (or "news") on cable.

There's an imperfect analogy with our dying newspapers, whose display and classified ad revenues have been sapped by the Internet, which in turn still offers most newspapers' hard-won and well-reported content for free. That can't be sustained much longer. How much does it cost the New York Times to keep a bureau in Beijing? A million dollars a year? More? And they'll pay for that with my free page views of the coverage? Not for long. After that, for fact-based insights about what the word's newest superpower is up to, we'll be relying on the Hackosphere, whose own overhead has been dramatically reduced thanks to free wireless at Starbucks.

Koppel argues that the market is now in control of the news business. If that's the case, I'd bet that three-quarters of the American people still want, and may even be willing to pay for, solid, unbiased, well-reported journalism. So there's some hope. On the other hand, we also want pragmatic politicians.

We Were Busy Breaking Into The Pepsi Machine

As editor of the Phillipian, the student weekly at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, I was responsible for editing reporters' copy for accuracy and clarity. The young people now running the paper have put all the old issues on line, enabling me to review my handiwork. On Jan. 11, 1973, we ran an article about President Nixon's appointment of George H. W. Bush as chairman of the Republican National Committee. The reporter wrote, and I let by, this egregious howler:

The former head of the United States delegation to the United States will replace Senator Robert J. Dole...

UN, U.S., whatever. We concluded:

Mr. Bush has two sons: Jeb, who graduated from PA in 1971, and Marvin, who is presently enrolled as a junior here.

Two out of three ain't bad.

How Easily I Can Be Had

Thanks to his own post today, I learned how Massachusetts prosecutors cut blogger Andrew Sullivan some slack on a minor marijuana rap to keep the conviction and $125 fine from interfering with his application for U.S. citizenship. I was about to write scaldingly about this bald, unjust preference for a bald and usually just cultural elite when I read this in the Boston Globe article to which Sullivan linked:

Jeanne M. Kempthorne, a Salem defense lawyer and former longtime federal prosecutor, said it was “perfectly legitimate’’ for prosecutors to weigh the potential impact of Sullivan’s case on his immigration status.

“Am I offended by the notion that prosecutors take into account collateral circumstances? No,’’ she said. “They should be doing that. That’s humane.’’

As editor of the weekly student paper, the Cynosure, at Abbot Academy, a girls boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, Jeanne invited me to be the managing editor for the spring term of my senior year at neighboring Phillips Academy, which enabled me on production nights to be the only boy in the basement of Draper Hall, the largest Abbot dorm, after hours.

Welcome to America, Andrew!

Accustoming Boys To Obey

From 1837 until his death in 1871, my seminary-trained great-great-grandfather, Samuel Harvey Taylor, was principal of Phillips Academy, a boys prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. In later years, it had a headmaster; these days, it has a head of school, Barbara Landis Chase. These successors of Dr. Taylor are lucky that Andover, which Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemmon, and the Presidents Bush all attended, survived him. While a lot about secondary education changed between the Presidential administrations of Gens. Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel Harvey Taylor did not. He discouraged the study and even reading of literary fiction, for instance, preferring a curriculum focused on Latin and Greek and maybe a little mathematics.

He died of a massive stroke one Sunday on the chapel steps. His massive gravestone says that students and faculty "made great lamentations" as a result. His son and grandson taught at or attended Andover, but my late father, Harvey Hileman Taylor, could not. He always dreamed that John Harvey Taylor would attend, and even after they had divorced, my mother struggled to make it possible. I probably wouldn't have gotten in without the family connection (I lived for three years in the shadow of Taylor Hall). Like Flounder in "Animal House," they had to take me. An indication of the quality of my academic work is that when I wrote a paper for Dr. Frederick Allis's History of Andover class about my own relative Dr. Taylor, I could only manage a C.

Ironic, then, that I should begin full-time work this week as the vicar of an Episcopal school in south Orange County. The blessing is that my work is primarily pastoral. We have a visionary headmaster with a third of a century's experience in independent and Episcopal education, Jim Lusby, who skillfully runs St. John's. While Mr. Lusby considers values education as important as academic success, we can be grateful he doesn't adhere to Dr. Taylor's specific doctrines, described by Professor Edward A. Park in an address contained in a memorial volume which was published by the principal's last class in 1871:

[Dr. Taylor] believed that one of the dangers to which this democratic land lies exposed is a disrespect for law: he therefore believed that he was performing an act of kindness to his pupils when he was accustoming them to obey. He believed that, if they would yield their wills to the authority of a school, they would more easily yield their individual interests to the civil government, and would be more apt to prostrate themselves before the Infinite Ruler and Sovereign.

Less so by the time I arrived in 1969, which turned out to be the last year of coats and ties and mandatory chapel. That same autumn, students successfully pressured the administration to cancel classes for a day so we could learn more about the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. The following year, "Time" magazine wrote about students smoking dope in the on-campus bird sanctuary and having sex with girls they had smuggled into the dorms. These were the last years of headmaster John Mason Kemper (who colorfully describes Uncle Sam's reign of fear here) and the first years of Theodore Sizer, a leading independent educator. Especially after it became coeducational in the fall of 1973, the year I was graduated, Dr. Taylor probably wouldn't have recognized the place, and yet it turned out to be a blessed experience for his great-great-grandson. I discovered my love of my parents' vocation of journalism and began to learn to live on my own. Thank you, Uncle Sam!